This course provides a guide to the spiritual and conceptual import of Jean Gebser’s integrative philosophy and its relevance for a warming planet.

Seeing Through the World is a course for scholars, artists, and integral practitioners of varied disciplines and walks of life. The class will consist of nine live, online classes, distilling a series of lessons from Gebser’s philosophical and poetic works, drawing from the aid of secondary sources, multimedia illustrations, spiritual exercises and experiential collective presencing sessions.

Jean Gebser (1905-1973) was a philosopher, poet, and phenomenologist of integral consciousness best known for his magisterial The Ever-Present Origin (Ursprung und Gegenwart, 1949). Writing in the mid-century during a period of intense cultural transformation and crisis in Europe, Gebser intuited a series of mutational leaps spanning the history of human consciousness, the latest of which emerging he called the “integral” structure, marked by the presence of time-freedom.

Gebser’s insights into the phenomenology of human consciousness has offered profound intellectual depth—and spiritual transmission—to the field of integral philosophy and consciousness studies, influencing the works of American historians such as William Irwin Thompson and the philosopher Ken Wilber. Further syncretic corroboration links Gebser’s integral epoch to those of the Indian revolutionary and yogi Sri Aurobindo’s “integral yoga” (The  Life Divine) and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s evolutionary mysticism (The Human Phenomenon).

​As William Irwin Thompson writes, “Gebser was a brilliantly intuitive mystic with a profound understanding of poetry and art,” and that Ever-Present Origin  is, “the kind of book that changed one’s life.” Georg Feuerstein, Gebser's colleague and friend, wrote that, “Socratic spirits like Gebser typically live before their time… perhaps the present climate is more receptive to Gebser’s arguments.” 

Now, in this time of extreme climate disruption and social fragmentation, we need more than ever “senseful” approaches that help us to revivify our future imaginaries. Yet, as Gebser would say, tomorrow is already present. The future lives in us. In this moment of civilizational crisis, Gebser’s time has come yet again to help us navigate a liminal age of worldview transition. We must learn to be sufficiently present in order to live the future that is already living us.